West’s poker face at Middle Eastern grand chessboard

The planned neo-colonial takeover of the Middle East is gearing up. As the heat rises, the West finds it increasingly difficult to proceed with its grab for dominance and maintain a brave face, says political analyst Adrian Salbuchi.

­Things are happening very fast in the Middle East. Tensions are mounting, threats are being made, and strange assassinations are taking place… Even stranger diplomatic, political, global media, military and economic strings are being pulled; sometimes so quickly, that they’re getting tangled! The atmosphere is becoming very rarefied indeed! A bit of historical perspective might even lead you to think we’re re-living August 1939: the last days before World War II.

But what is really happening over there and why? Well, to begin with, we witnessed twenty years during which the US, UK, France, other NATO members, and Israel have variously attacked, bombed and overrun Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, and Palestine almost constantly and unimpaired.

Millions of Muslims have died as a consequence of these aggressions which have been based either on flagrant lies like Iraq’s non-existent WMDs, or Iran’s alleged A-Bomb program. Blatant double-standards make the media systematically ignore Israeli ethnic cleansing in Palestine. Last year we saw a fabricated and engineered social turmoil throughout the region – dubbed the “Arab Spring.”

There is consistent misrepresentation of the true nature of the Middle East conflict, the true goals of its wide assortment of players, and the true root causes of all the violence and turmoil. But now the Western powers are finally confronted with two tough cookies to crack: Syria and Iran. In these conflicts their masks are starting to fall. And when masks suddenly fall, many are caught off-guard showing their real faces.

For example, how will the Western powers now explain to the world that the so-called “Free Syrian Army” – clearly trained, supported, financed and armed by the Western powers’ covert agencies – now counts on the support of Al-Qaeda, of all people! On 15th February, Al-Qaeda’s leader Ayman al-Zawahri called on “all Muslims from Turkey, Iraq, Lebanon” to come to the aide of the “Syrian rebels.”

Well, what a surprise! Wasn’t Al-Qaeda supposed to be leading “international terrorism” against the US, UK, France and Israel? Now, as James Clapper the US Director of National Intelligence told the US Senate Armed Services Committee on February 16, we learn Al-Qaeda is working with a common purpose alongside the US and UK in Syria!

Strange bed fellows you say? I don’t think so…

Lucid observers have known all along that al-Qaeda is a creature of US and British intelligence. Take it from Robin Cook, who was leader of the UK House of Commons & Lord President of the Council in Tony Blair’s cabinet in 2003, but preferred to resign in March of that year rather than support Tony Blair’s poodle-like policy of following Baby Bush to war against Iraq.

He said in an article in the Guardian newspaper on July 8, 2005 that “Bin Laden was… a product of a monumental miscalculation by Western security agencies. Throughout the 80’s he was armed by the CIA and funded by the Saudis to wage jihad against the Russian occupation of Afghanistan. Al-Qaida, literally "the database", was originally the computer file of the thousands of Mujahideen who were recruited and trained with help from the CIA to defeat the Russians.”

Al-Qaeda’s promotion from sworn enemy to an awkward but useful ally came in a moment. The Taliban is now no longer the ultimate evil in Afghanistan, but a party to be negotiated with ahead of the US pullout. Things the Western media told us hold true get distorted and mutate into their opposite. Think: how many of today’s other “unquestionable truths” are built on sand of deceit and misconceptions?

For years on end now the US, UK and Israel have threatened Iran with unilateral military attack over a non-existent nuclear threat. However, they look the other way at Israel’s own action-ready nuclear bombs; the Israelis never even bothered to sign the Non-Proliferation Treaty!

Iran’s the threat in the Middle East, you bet! Even though Iran has never attacked nor invaded any of its neighbors in over a century.

But it threatens to “erase Israel from the map”, one would say. It’s another West-falsified “fact”. What President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad called for in his October 26, 2005 speech quoting Ayatollah Khomeini, was for the need that the “regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time”.A very different story indeed! Tehran hardly has a monopoly for calling for a regime change in foreign nations. And Washington, London and Tel Aviv are much more vocal in such exercises.

So it all depends on how you report things, and why there are certain things the West prefers not to report. Clearly, Middle East is a complicated geopolitical chessboard, and we must be very sharp and alert to understand what’s really going on.

Keep one thing in mind, though: Americans invented and play poker, which is a game of deceit and lies. The Sassanid Persians from whom today’s Iranians descend invented chess in the 7th Century, which is a game of strategy and intelligence…

Adrian Salbuchi for RT

­Adrian Salbuchi is a political analyst, author, speaker and radio/TV commentator in Argentina. www.asalbuchi.com.ar

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in the story are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.